That’s the amount by which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, President Obama’s signature health care law will effectively reduce the U.S. work force over the next decade.

The initial Republican reaction was predictable: Pundits filled the airwaves, Cassandra-like, to paint Obamacare as the ultimate job killer. Never mind that, reading the fine print, it’s clear the CBO was talking about workers voluntarily reducing their hours in response to the law—not getting laid off or seeing their shifts scaled back.

And anyway, isn’t that supposed to be a good thing?

The president’s critics, in high dudgeon, are fulminating about lay-abouts and scofflaws actually choosing to work less than what God intended, predicting a host of ills that will supposedly befall the nation, from moral turpitude to economic ruin.

The fuss will doubtless soon die down, but this bit of political theater has resurrected a very old debate about working hours, and could conceivably reawaken what I have called the forgotten American Dream. That dream has not always been just about striving to consume bigger houses, fancier clothes, faster cars. The idea that “full time” work is something foreordained and the bedrock of morality is new, mostly a product of the last century.

During the Industrial Revolution, Americans worked incredibly long hours. It was common for people to work from dawn to dusk, often into the night, six days a week—better than 60 to 70 hours a week with no vacation and few holidays. It was all very Dickensian— remember Bob Cratchit’s appeal to Scrooge for Christmas day off? That was America in the 19th century.

The birth of the labor movement changed that. Beginning in the 1820s,laborites began pressing for higher wages and shorter hours. For more than a century, and until about 40 years ago, unions, supported by numerous economists, pressed for shorter hours as one of the primary ways to deal with unemployment. They argued that as the economy improved, workers would need higher wages to buy what they produced and more free time to use all the new products.

For more than a century before 1930, the average American’s working hours were gradually reduced—cut nearly in half. Labor played a part in these reductions, but they were largely a product of the free market, reflecting individuals’ choices to work less and less.

Most Americans approved, counting work reductions as the better half of industrial progress (higher wages and shorter hours). No one expected this progress would end. Quite the contrary. Through the last century, observers such as John Maynard Keynes, Julien Huxley, Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Eric Sevareid regularly predicted that soon America would enter an age of leisure in which we would chose to devote more and more of our lives to the “pursuit of happiness” promised in the Declaration of Independence. As technology created “labor-saving” machines and the economy grew, they reasoned, we would gradually be able to buy back more of our time from our jobs, preferring leisure to new goods and services that we had never needed, or even seen before.

Then real progress would begin. Humane and moral progress. Instead of perpetual consumerism and the infinite increase in material wealth, we would naturally turn to improving the human condition, learning how to live together “wisely, agreeable, and well,” as Keynes put it. Progress would then take the form of healthier families, communities and cities—the increase of knowledge, the enjoyment of nature, history and other peoples, an increasing delight in the marvels of the human spirit, the practice of our beliefs and values together, the finding of common ground for conviviality, expanding our awareness of God, wondering in Creation.

These lofty sentiments mixed with the ordinary delights: slow meals together (Ralph Waldo Emerson), conversations in the evening (Henry David Thoreau), dancing the night away (William Ellery Channing), singing in the choir (Jonathan Edwards), “observing a spear of summer grass” (Walt Whitman), reading and talking about books (Robert Hutchins), playing amateur sports (Fannia Cohn) and walking around Central Park in the dead of winter (Elizabeth Hasanovitz). Even Abraham Lincoln believed that the steam plow and other agricultural technologies would free farm workers from steady toil for more opportunities to learn, socialize, govern themselves and pursue happiness.

Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt is professor of leisure studies at the University of Iowa and author of The Forgotten American Dream.